Mitchell Starc got his fourth five-wicket haul in D/N Tests and his 15th overall in Test cricket as Australia bowled India out for 180 on the first day in Adelaide on Friday, reports Cricbuzz.
With the first ball of the match, Starc had Yashasvi Jaiswal, the centurion from the first Test, playing around a full ball and being trapped LBW. It gave an underfire Australia the perfect start on their comeback trail and ought to have sowed doubts in India's mind about batting first.
Indian opener KL Rahul, got a reprieve, when he was adjudged caught behind off Scott Boland's first ball but was asked to come back because the pacer had overstepped. Usman Khawaja also put him down in the same over at first slip. With those reprieves, and a fluent Shubman Gill at the other end, India managed to pull their way back into the game. Gill, playing his first Test of the series, showed little signs of any rustiness as he cashed in on Starc's attacking lengths to pick up some eye-catching boundaries. After getting off the mark only off he 24th ball he faced, Rahul too began to get his eye in.
The duo put India in a position of relative comfort with a 69-run stand. But against the run of play, Australia regained control in the last half hour of the opening session. All of Australia's pacers had stamped their presence with Cummins being the most miserly. But it was Starc, coming back for his second spell, that did the damage again. He had Rahul caught low at gully by Nathan McSweeney and a tentative Virat Kohli poking out and edging to second slip.
But the cherry on top was Boland, who got the better of Gill. The batter had countered Boland's off-stump channel probes with a different trigger movement that allowed him to cover his offstump more and leave well. But it also exposed him to the full ball, which Boland finally deployed toward the end of the session and trapped Gill leg before. Losing three wickets in the space of fifteen balls left India down in the doldrums at the interval and kept going downhill thereafter.
Indian skipper Rohit Sharma, now coming in at No. 6, was done in by a sharp incoming delivery from Boland while Cummins got a solid-looking Rishabh Pant with a snorter of a short ball. Starc came back to claim his five-fer yorking both R Ashwin and Harshit Rana in the same over.
With the tail for company, Nitish Reddy picked out a few shots from the T20 playbook including an audacious reverse-scooped six off Boland. He was the last man dismissed for an innings-topping 42, trying to hit out against Starc, who finished with career-best figures of 6/48.
Bd-pratidin English/Tanvir Raihan
